DAlden  Nov.12.2020
Photo by John and Lynn Salmon

Congratulations to Riverkeeper Sweep for successfully encouraging so many of us to get outside and improve our waterways and trails on October 17, 2020. The Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct accepted the invitation to participate, having missed our traditional I Love My Park Day in May 2020. We set up three separate sites, restricted registration, wore our masks, and managed our work while socially distancing. We had a very successful event with 39 participants.

Many thanks to the volunteers and to our newest corporate sponsor Croton Energy Group, Inc., to our long-time sponsor Feed the Birds, and to Robbins Pharmacy, which provided individual PPE to all our participants, quite a sign of the times. Special thanks to John and Lynn Salmon, who found their way to all three sites to take many of the pictures in this blog.

Daria Gregg and Karalyn Lamb led the work on an Ossining section of the Old Croton Aqueduct with ten additional volunteers. They managed 673 invasive plants (we keep a tally), planted trees, bushes, and native plants and grasses, and spread a thousand seeds of native wildflowers and grasses on the site where they had removed the invasive plants.

Photo by Lynn Salmon

Photo by John and Lynn Salmon

This is an area in Ossining on the OCA which Daria Gregg, a long-time Citizen Scientist at the New York Botanical Garden, has adopted and has been stewarding for a number of years, removing invasive plants and restoring with native plants and shrubs, resulting in a wildflower meadow.  (See https://aqueduct.org/news/adopting-part-trail with its accompanying videos on this website.) So, it was very rewarding to be able to provide her with additional assistance and encouragement to keep going.  Karalyn Lamb, a member of the Westchester Community College’s Native Plant Center and Pollinator Pathway Northeast steering committees brought a Pollinator Pathway sign to officially designate this area as a Pollinator Pathway site since it now qualifies. 

Photo by Lynn and John Salmon

The Quaker Bridge site was led by Mathew MacDowell, a horticulturist who is Garden Director of the Leon Levy native plant garden for Bedford Audubon Society and is a Wildflower Island tour guide at Teatown Lake Reservation and by Diane Alden, also a Wildflower Island guide. We led a group of nine additional volunteers 

The most outstanding aspect of the event on Quaker Bridge Road was that the volunteers followed our instructions to be extremely careful to only remove invasive species that they could positively identify and thus to do no harm to the native species.  They did an amazing job of doing this so that a number of the areas of the trail now have whole swaths of flourishing native species without an invasive plant in sight; we can be sure that the native plants will thrive.  The volunteers removed a total of 5,457 invasive plants, many of which were small seedlings in an area where large bushes were removed in previous years, leaving a giant seed bank. Most of the plants were dug up by the roots so they will not re-grow.

Photo by Diane Alden

Photo by John and Lynn Salmon

Photo by Diane Alden  

We also cut down a few large bushes in order to prevent further spread of the seeds.  This is an area of the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail that has been a focus of attention since 2012 in an ongoing effort to control invasive plants to encourage the flourishing of native species, so important to the local pollinators and to the ecosystem. 

Photo by Sheela Moorthy

The third site was led by Ryan Goolic, Terrestrial Invasive Species Project Manager of the NY-NJ Trail Conference, and the Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management (PRISM). This was a group in which four of the additional 15 volunteers were members of the New York New Jersey Trail Conference’s Invasive Strike Force who were able to provide guidance to the other volunteers, so this project was done in a highly professional and effective manner.  Three of the other volunteers were also N NJ Trail Conference’s AmeriCorps members who have been working as Trail Stewards on the Old Croton Aqueduct and the Croton Gorge Unique Area this past season; this was the culmination of their season.  The others were local residents.

Photo by John and Lynn Salmon

The volunteers managed 684 Siebold’s viburnum and 47 Linden viburnums for a total of 731 invasive trees in a 1.44-acre section above the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail close to the dam. These were very large, seed bearing trees that are considered emerging invasive plants; a high priority for removal since they have only recently arrived and there is a chance that we can prevent their spread by managing and removing them.  If they are not managed, they will completely take over the woods where they are growing and crowd out the native plants.  This is also part of an ongoing effort to manage the invasive plants in this section of the woods above the OCA; additional work is planned for the coming year. 

Photo by John and Lynn Salmon

As always when I write these reports, I encourage local residents and members of the Friends to hike on the Old Croton Aqueduct from the dam and south though the beginning of Ossining and observe the beauty of the trail this fall season, note the variety of trees turning color and the wonderful ferns dotting the hillsides where they are doing their job of erosion control. Save the date: May 1, 2021 for the 9th annual I Love My Park Day/Riverkeeper Sweep. We are already planning small events up and down the trail to continue our important work, which we are finding we can do responsibly and effectively even during the pandemic. For those living in communities alongside the Aqueduct, consider adopting a small section to manage, remove invasive species and restore with native plants. Lots of guidance and technical assistance is most definitely available.

Diane Alden, Cortlandt
Friends of the old Croton Aqueduct